Gaze

bell hooks states on page 18, “Given the real life public circumstances wherein black men were murdered/lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the black male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white Other, the private realm of television screens or dark theaters could unleash the repressed gaze.” After reading this passage and considering our first discussion on the film, Compensation, I tried to think of what it was like to watch mainstream films from as…

The male gaze is not eminent when the consumer is not looking specifically for it but it is indeed visible in most advertisements and some cinematic displays. More specifically the male gaze makes women the object of their gaze and the male counterpart has subjectivity whereas the women are defined by their lack of subjectivity. Women who fall victim to the male gaze are often reduced to objects of the men that they are being stared by…

One of the debates that emerged from the brutal and vastly covered in media, The Delhi Gang Rape (2012), was if Bollywood promoted rape culture through its item numbers critiquing the male gaze on women’s bodies and questioning whether the hyper-sexualization of Bollywood’s actresses served to normalize sexual harassment. The new trend being, the asexual, good Indian girl (who ultimately is coveted by the hero) constructed against the sexualized item-girl and one instantly thinks of the…

important to not here that, after his literal failure to enact and/or perform these masculine virtue –i.e. after the authenticity of his ‘he’- is questioned by his behavior, Orlando sleeps and wakes up to find himself a woman, gazes at her nude self in the mirror, shifts her gaze directly to the audience, and says “same person, just a different sex”…

Women have been at the gaze of men for the duration of time for as long as we can remember. Laura Mulvey places this fact very strongly in her writing Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and asserts that this has made a victim of the female gender. However, she seems to consider not how scopophilia can be a sensation felt by a woman, nor how she can also be the barer of the same gaze that a man may give. It is also discussed that, perhaps, men are unable to even receive the gaze, suggesting…

clear image of the scene in my mind and was prepared for performing the piece. Unfortunately, the image I created disappeared while I was performing which caused my gaze to be unsteady and a little confusing for the audience. That being said, a majority of the negative feedback I received from my peers and Dr. Kent was about my gaze. When I started performing I just totally forgot about the need to place characters on the…

society is structured upon a patriarchal system which recognizes the male as the authoritative figure with power over the female and mainstream cinema helps to reinforce these ideas onto the audience (dictionary). Using Laura Mulvey’s Theory of ‘the Gaze’, I will demonstrate how Arthur Penn’s depiction of the characters Bonnie Parker, Blanche Barrow and Clyde Barrow aid in perpetuating hegemonic ideologies of…

wholly dependent on medical staff for basic daily needs and biological survival. I argue that the concept of the “gaze” has become embedded within the relationship between medical staff, specifically nurses, and the patient, which allows power differentials to become manifest within this relationship. Coined by Michel Foucault (1963), the “clinical gaze” (commonly known as the “gaze”) is defined as an…

I argue Lady Audley’s portrait is crucial to the movement and culmination of Braddon’s novel. Its symbolic implications are multivalent: as Lynette Felber writes, ‘[the portrait] protests the power and authority of the male gaze; it anatomizes fetishistic desire; and it raises questions about the construction of women and their sexuality in Victorian society’. Structurally, the portrait heralds the fate of Lady Audley by revealing her dual nature, by implicating a significant secret, and by…

pulled up, make sure you are not moving your hips too much when you walk, and do not make eye contact with them. As they got closer and closer I felt my heart beat harder and harder. I could feel their eyes glaring at me almost undressing me with their gaze as I passed. I prayed this time they would let me pass without any vulgar comments. Finally, I passed them and breathed a sigh of relief, until I heard one of the men whistle. I rolled my eyes and kept walking until I felt a hand on my arm.…